Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (26 page)

Loyalty was an increasingly vexed issue in 1917. The Military Service Act of January 1916 had introduced conscription for all single men between the ages of nineteen and forty-one. That was adjusted in May to include married men without children. The fact was that by 1917, although the Army managed to reach its target of an additional 800,000 men, the number of fit soldiers able to serve at the front line was falling. Those who were serving were able to take only half the leave they were entitled to. Feelings of resentment towards those who were not perceived to be doing their bit were increasing.

The Western Front continued to stack up with the bodies of young men. In June 1917 the British scored a significant success when they captured the Messines Ridge, near Ypres, using a different tactic: the deployment of mines before the artillery attack. But any forward momentum was lost when there was an eight-week delay before the launch of the next attack. After the strategic success at Messines and the relatively low casualties, expectations were high. Passchendaele crushed them all back into the mud.

The battle opened on 31 July and lasted until early November. It was another exchange of pitiless attrition,
with heavy shells pounding into both armies’ defences and no-man’s-land between them, day and night. The ground, which was boggy even in a dry summer, was destroyed by the explosions, which left behind overlapping craters, huge pockmarks that filled with water, mud and bodies. Then it began to rain. It rained every day apart from three in August. The mud was inescapable. Trenches collapsed, burying men alive; they drowned in mud up and down the lines. There was no relief anywhere, from the noise, the fear, the threat of a gas attack. Depending on the amount of poison released, gas was sometimes merely one more irritant, but other times it was a terrifying choking fog that caused blindness. In very heavy gas attacks, men drowned in it as it dissolved their lungs. There were many ways to die in the Great War.

The little band of Highclere men who had joined up in the summer of 1916, who had trained together and been out in France for six months, dodging bullets, staying lucky, fought at Passchendaele. Stan Herrington survived several months but was killed in September, aged nineteen. In October it was Tommy Hill’s turn. His wife, Florence, had borne his absence as best she could, cherishing every letter, refusing to believe that her Tommy wouldn’t make it back. His body, like so many others at Passchendaele, was never found.

When she got the telegram to say that he was missing in action, Florence decided to wait for better news. Perhaps she believed he had been taken prisoner. Florence waited and waited until finally, more than two years later, after the Armistice, she had to accept that her husband was dead. She never remarried. When her nephew was born, he was named Tommy, in honour of the uncle he had never known.

Henry Crawley had been fighting in Ypres in 1917 and was wounded and sent to Lady Carnarvon’s hospital. He had already fought at Gallipoli and now he had also survived the Somme. His parents lived in Bethnal Green in London so it was easy for them to visit their son. Apprehensive after the stress of the previous three years, they said goodbye as he left again to join his battalion in France. This time the letters stopped, and like so many other parents they could only visit his named grave in the war cemetery in France. He was killed in May 1918.

By contrast, Almina was thrilled when David Campbell turned up on her doorstep at Bryanston Square. She had not heard from him since he left Highclere. ‘She gave me a terrific welcome,’ he wrote, and then she whirled him upstairs to show him round her wonderful hospital and meet all the patients. She was thrilled that he had been awarded the Military Cross and made him promise to come again the following week so she could spoil him and take him out to lunch.

Highclere in 1917 echoed with ghosts. It was virtually shut up; Lady Evelyn was the only member of the family still spending most of her time at the house. Lord Carnarvon was back and forth between London and the Castle, depending on the state of his health and the need to work on estate matters. Almina hated to leave Bryanston Square unattended, but she fretted about her daughter and popped down for the odd weekend to be with her.

Eve missed Porchy and was lonely and unsure of herself; she was sixteen years old with a sense of waiting for her life to start that was exacerbated by the nation’s endless suffering. The house felt sad without the bustle of the hospital, which Eve had enjoyed, and although she was
naturally inclined to work hard on her lessons, it was difficult to feel confident about a bright future. The old path for a girl in her position – the debutante season that would lead to making a good marriage – was something of a sideshow compared to the trauma the country was experiencing. Eve looked forward anxiously to her trips to town and her parents’ visits, and devoured the letters from her brother that connected her to a bigger world.

When her father was at the Castle they dined together in the State Dining Room, seated below the Van Dyck portrait of Charles I on horseback. The wonder of a house like Highclere is that, although change rages around it, its physical fabric stays so recognisable. There is a comfort in the way so many things endure. Eve might have been lonely sometimes, but she could never feel completely lost when she was at home in the house she had lived in all her life, a house that was a monument to her family’s permanence.

Eve and her father had always been devoted to one another and now their conversations about estate business, the war and the hospital brought them even closer together. Lord Carnarvon was desperate to get back to Egypt and resume his life’s work, and Eve, who was as fascinated by the elegance of Ancient Egyptian art as her father, loved to listen to his plans for resuming the excavations. There was sporadic news from Howard Carter, who had reported for duty in Cairo and been assigned to the Intelligence Department of the War Office. He wrote to tell Lord Carnarvon that he had been able to undertake some clearing work in the Valley of the Kings, but there could be no real progress until the war was won.

One topic that, given his instinctive reticence, Lord Carnarvon probably chose not to discuss with Eve was his concern to avoid giving up any of the land at Highclere to the government. Since 1916 there had been a policy of land requisition, with compensation for owners, so that more food could be produced. But Lord Carnarvon found the official agricultural policies absurd. He had written to his sister in December 1916, ‘Most of the agricultural schemes I see mooted are too foolish for words. As if you could sow wheat on commons in that casual way.’ He was doing everything he could to keep enough men at Highclere for the farm to continue to function, and was convinced that this would be a more efficient way to maximise output than handing over land to be farmed by strangers on behalf of central government. Carnarvon had asked his long-serving agent, James Rutherford, to write to the authorities to request a dispensation for Blake, the head gardener, removing his obligation to volunteer. ‘It is far more important that the Hospital should continue to be supplied with fruit and vegetables than that Blake should be put to some unsuitable form of labour.’

Aubrey and Mary were occasional visitors to Highclere and Eve looked forward especially eagerly to their arrival now that she was a teenager and often starved of company. Aubrey had always been a favourite of both his niece and nephew and they adored him, but his elder brother was troubled by some of the conversations that went on around the dining-room table. Politics could not be kept off the agenda when Aubrey was around and his views were becoming more and more controversial. He was increasingly voting with the Labour Party and the pacifists in the House
of Commons. Mary cautioned him that Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper baron who owned both
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, had a habit of destroying the reputations of men like Aubrey. Look at Lord Lansdowne, who had been vilified for writing that ‘the prolongation of the war [would] spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it.’

But if ever there was a time for the pacifist position to be taken seriously, it was the second half of 1917. The Allies’ prospects were worsening by the day. Field Marshal Haig was insistent that the Germans were on the brink of collapse and that the war of attrition was working, but that simply wasn’t borne out by results. In reality the Germans benefited hugely from two developments. Firstly, they managed to knock Italy out of the conflict in just two months through superb logistical management, and thereby prop up the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire a little while longer. Then, in December, the demoralised and defeated Russians sued for peace. Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states were all turned into a German protectorate and forty German divisions could be transferred from the Eastern to the Western Front. The Central Powers believed the end was in sight. They were to make one last huge effort to break through on the West and defeat the Allies. Morale in England could not have been lower. Eight hundred thousand British soldiers were killed or injured in 1917.

The end of the year saw inches’ worth of ground gained and then lost, a depressing back and forth across the bog that had been northern France. The British Army’s attack at the Battle of Cambrai utilised tanks as well as a lighter, more mobile artillery, and was planned with the benefit of
aerial reconnaissance. Initial gains couldn’t be held, though, and the British were fought back by German storm troopers.

At the same time as the deadly dance on the Western Front was claiming more lives, Lord Porchester was rejoicing over the telegram for which he had been waiting almost a year. The 7th Hussars were being sent to fight the Turks. Mesopotamia had claimed the lives of thousands of British and Indian men after the humiliating siege of Kut al-Amara, but the pressing need to defend the oil fields hadn’t abated, and since then there had been a change of fortunes. Two hundred thousand men deployed to the region had succeeded in taking Baghdad in March 1917. Porchy was going to join a brigade of reinforcements who were needed to respond to the rumoured counterattack from the Ottoman Army.

The war in Arabia was the last campaign in which there could still conceivably be a role for the cavalry. Only a few months beforehand, Field Marshal Haig had finally given up on his cherished urge to deploy them against the German trenches, when he had ordered a mounted unit to wait for a breakthrough at Passchendaele and then rush through the lines to attack. The breakthrough never came, the horses churned the ground to even stickier mud and the plan to use the cavalry in France was at last abandoned. But the desert sands of the Middle East were very different: there were no heavily defended trenches to contend with. Porchy’s regiment joined a force being shipped from India over to Basra and from there they began the 500-mile march on Baghdad.

The troops’ enthusiasm for finally seeing some action evaporated almost instantly in the ferocious heat. Even as
they set off, Porchy and his men heard that there had been 360 deaths from heatstroke the previous day. It was blisteringly hot by day, freezing by night, and dysentery, malaria and sand-fly fever were rampant.

Allied High Command were proved right about the usefulness of highly trained men and horses, though. One band of men rode hard into the desert away from the Euphrates to cut off the flank of the Ottoman Army, and Porchy and his men mounted an ambush on the Aleppo road to pick up the Turkish forces as they retreated. It all worked exactly as planned, and the Ottoman 50th Division was defeated. But, even in the midst of this low-casualty success, a boy’s own adventure compared to the slaughter in France and Belgium, there was horror. Porchy came upon a cave in the hills of the desert in which an entire Arab village had taken shelter from the conflict. They had been completely cut off by the Ottoman Army and hundreds of people had starved to death. At first he thought there was no one left alive, that the cave was full of emaciated corpses, but then he saw that a few of them were still clinging on to life. The regiment of happy-go-lucky Anglo-Indians, who had been playing polo just two months before, were incredulous at the fate of these civilian men, women and children. When they desperately tried to feed the villagers their rations of condensed milk, it was more than the Arabs’ wasted frames could take. The last remaining survivors died in the soldiers’ arms.

The war turned up suffering everywhere – there was a never-ending supply of it – but at Bryanston Square there was an enclave where it could at least be alleviated with expertise and patience, and in comfort. The contrast between
what the men had seen and what they experienced under Almina’s care was almost surreal, like the sickening disconnection between starving villagers and condensed milk.

Sidney Roberts was sent to Lady Carnarvon’s hospital from France with a shattered right leg. The orderly who dispatched him said he was sending him to Lady Carnarvon’s place ‘because they liked good surgical cases there.’ Sidney captured the oddness as well as the luxurious ease of life at ‘48’ perfectly when he wrote to thank Almina and told her what he particularly remembered. There was the exquisite breakfast in bed served by Almina’s butler, while the footman politely enquired not whether he would like to read a paper, but which paper he required first. Like so many of Almina’s correspondents, Sidney was obviously much cheered by the banter of the Irish nurses. Dr Johnnie had also made a great impression. He was undoubtedly an excellent doctor but apparently he never really got the hang of the X-ray machine. At Sidney’s first examination he turned various switches on and off in ‘an experimental way’ before saying brightly, ‘Well, the whole place will probably blow up. You don’t mind do you?’ It’s a good thing Sidney Roberts was inclined to laugh, because one can’t help thinking that some of Almina’s patients might have taken that quip rather hard.